The results obtained from Neural Machine Translation are amazing, in particular, the neural network’s paraphrasing. It almost seems as if the neural network really “understands” the sentence to translate. In this first article, we are interested in “meaning,” that which gives an idea of the type of semantic knowledge the neural networks use to translate.

Let us start with a glimpse of how the 3 technologies work, the different steps of each translation process and the resources that each technology uses to translate. Then we will take a look at a few examples and compare what each technology must do to translate them correctly.